Exeter Hospital wants freeze on legal discoveries in hep c outbreak

Tuesday

Oct 2, 2012 at 3:15 AM

By JIM HADDADIN jhaddadin@fosters.com

BRENTWOOD — Exeter Hospital is asking a superior court judge to temporarily block attorneys from using their legal powers to request documents and information about the hepatitis C outbreak at the facility.

Exeter Hospital is named in 25 lawsuits filed in Rockingham Superior Court by former patients who now carry the liver disease. That includes a class-action lawsuit filed by Concord attorney Peter McGrath, whose clients now include 147 former Exeter Hospital patients. A handful have tested positive for the disease. The remainder either received a negative test result or are awaiting more information.

An attorney representing Exeter Hospital against the lawsuits filed a motion Friday in Rockingham County Superior Court asking a judge to issue a temporary stay of discovery in the cases. The move would stop the lawyers from forcing employees such as Chief Executive Officer Kevin Callahan to give sworn statements about the hepatitis C outbreak.

It would also prevent them from questioning the doctors and nurses who worked side-by-side with David Kwiatkowski, the former Exeter Hospital cardiovascular technician facing drug tampering charges in connection with the hepatitis C outbreak.

Federal investigators say the 33-year-old spread the virus to patients in the process of abusing stolen hospital narcotics. Kwiatkowski, a traveling hospital worker, allegedly stole syringes of the anesthesia drug fentanyl, injected himself, then allowed syringes contaminated with his blood to be reused on patients.

Genetic testing has confirmed that 32 patients of the hospital are carrying the identical strain of the virus diagnosed in Kwiatkowski.

Attorney Peter Mosseau, of Nelson Kinder + Mosseau, the law firm representing the hospital, has asked the judge to freeze discovery actions until at least 90 days after a structuring conference is held with defendants in the lawsuit.

Those defendants are likely to include at least two former medical staffing companies that employed Kwiatkowski. At least one attorney is also asking a judge to add the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists (ARRT) as one of the defendants. ARRT is the group that provided a radiology certificate for Kwiatkowski when he was later hired at Exeter Hospital.

Kwiatkowski has been employed as a traveling medical technician in at least 19 hospitals in eight states during the last decade, including stints in New York, Maryland, Michigan, Georgia, Kansas, Arizona and Pennsylvania. His arrest has spurred more than a dozen hospitals to begin reviewing their patient records to identify people who may have been exposed to the virus.

At least four patients of the Hays Medical Center in Kansas, where Kwiatkowski worked in 2010, have also been diagnosed with cases of hepatitis C "closely related" to the strain identified in the Exeter Hospital outbreak.

Before he was hired in Exeter, Kwiatkowski was fired by hospitals in Pennsylvania and Arizona due to problems with his conduct. In one instance in 2010, Kwiatkowski was found passed out inside a men's restroom while working at the Arizona Heart Hospital.

According to documents obtained by Foster's Daily Democrat, the hospital worker who found Kwiatkowski reported finding a syringe labeled "fentanyl" floating inside the toilet beside him.

Springboard Staffing, which supplied Kwiatkowski to work at Arizona Heart Hospital, said it fired Kwiatkowski immediately and told both a state radiology board and ARRT that Kwiatkowski had been terminated after the 2010 incident. The incident was never investigated because Kwiatkowski moved out of the state and gave up his certification to work in Arizona.

He went on to work in hospitals in Pennsylvania, Kansas and Georgia before reaching New Hampshire.

Hepatitis C is a liver disease that can lead to fatal health complications. It is transferred through direct blood contact or from unsterilized or contaminated equipment used or handled by a person infected with the virus. The hepatitis C virus can't be contracted through casual contact, meaning you can't get hepatitis C from shaking hands, hugging or sitting next to an infected person.